thedrifter
05-22-09, 08:46 AM
Veteran Bartz remembers time in Marine invasion of Iwo Jima
By Joel Stottrup
If you look on page 43 of Ken Bartz’ copy of “The Spearhead, the World War II History of the 5th Marine Division” by Howard M. Conner, you will find a handwritten remark by Bartz.
The book states that prior to invading the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima in the South Pacific, the 50,000 Marines on board ships in front of Iwo Jima “gobbled a breakfast of steak and eggs.”
Bartz refuted that with a handwritten comment on the bottom of the page that says: “Not so, they got bologna sandwiches.”
Bartz, of Princeton, ought to know, as he was one of the Marines in the invasion.
Bartz was also wounded during the invasion and has the Purple Heart medal for it.
Bartz, 83, with his wife Phyllis seated next to him, recounted his experiences leading up to, during and after the Iwo Jima invasion.
The taking of Iwo Jima was one of the most bloody battles of World War II and came toward the end of the war as the allies in the Pacific were closing in on Japan.
The American losses are recorded at 6,821.
A sickly boy is chosen for the tough duty
Bartz grew up on a dairy farm in Bogus Brook Township six miles north of the city of Princeton.
Bartz was in his own words, “sickly” all through his high school years.
He explained that he had a type of hernia in which his heart was positioned in the wrong place, “sort of crushing his lungs and hampering his breathing.”
He was advised, because of his health, to get off the farm and find work that was “light.” Shortly after graduation from high school he had surgery that successfully repositioned some organs. Six months later, in March 1944, he was drafted.
This went against a doctor’s prediction that Bartz would never enter military service. Bartz said a doctor offered to write a letter to keep him out of the military, but Bartz decided against it.
Bartz was part of a group of 20 army draftees assembled at Ft. Snelling in St. Paul when an officer announced that 10 of the 20 were needed to join the Navy. The 10 were classified as the “better fit” people in the 20, and Bartz was chosen as one of the 10.
That was kind of ironic, Bartz indicated, being he hadn’t yet healed from his hernia operation.
Things got even tougher for him when he ended up one of three men selected from the original 10, as fit to be a Marine.
Bartz considered this a bit odd, since he weighed only 115 pounds at the time.
When he arrived for his basic training in San Diego, Calif., he had to go to the hospital for a month because he wasn’t done healing from his hernia surgery.
Meanwhile, he was hearing reports from other recruits of how tough the Marine Corps training was. He remembers thinking that he was ready to get out of the Marines right there and return home to the family farm.
But the Marines kept him and he decided that he was going to hold up his end during training, despite still being weak.
But he ran into a challenge he could not conquer right away, and that was to pass the Marines’ swimming test. After not passing it with the rest of his company he was placed on kitchen duty for a month until he could join another Marine company.
Once in his new company, he was given more swimming instruction. It was the kind of training where they “leave you to drown, almost, and then pick you up,” he said.
He finally passed the swimming test and left basic training for advanced instruction at Camp Pendleton, a short distance up the California coast. He was trained for six months to be part of a 60mm mortar cannon squad.
Then he was put aboard a ship in San Diego heading out across the Pacific Ocean. First stop was the big island of Hawaii. There he trained for four months. It was now the latter part of 1944 and the Japanese had fortified various home islands in the South Pacific. Bartz says that while in Hawaii he still didn’t know where the Marine Corps was sending him.
As his ship reached Iwo Jima, the officers informed the Marines where they would be invading. Iwo Jima stood as a barren rock of an island where the allies had been bombing incessantly in hopes of reducing the Japanese ability to defend.
Bartz remembers being told by superiors that, because of the allied bombing, the Marine 5th Division could just “walk on” to the island because “nobody was there.”
While the Japanese defenders held their fire for a short time as the Marines began landing, the Japanese once firing, resisted fiercely.
Bartz’s Fifth Division was assigned to take Mt. Suribachi, on the south end of Iwo Jima.
The record continues that allied air power took over at 8:05 a.m. to bomb and strafe the island.
After a period of that, ships blasted the island again for a time. The Marines began moving ashore in waves at about 8:30 a.m.
The men had been given “bologna and powdered eggs” that morning instead of the promised steak and eggs, and that “made us mad,” Bartz said.
“What are we doing here?” he remembers thinking as the Marines were going in to shore. He knew the island was only eight miles across at its longest and two miles at its shortest. How could all the fighting equipment such as the tanks and artillery that were amassed, fit on the crowded space, he recalled wondering.
He also wondered what the invasion would be like at night. But Bartz would not have to worry about that as things turned out.
Bartz said that as he moved onto the beach in one of the first waves of the invasion force, there was no shooting from the Japanese. That is, until eight waves of Marines had landed, he explained.
Japanese tanks and artillery pieces that were hidden in caves, or dug into the rocky terrain then opened up. Besides the many caves that hid the enemy, the caves were connected to a huge tunnel system.
Advancing was difficult for the Marines and their armored equipment because the beach was a soft lava sand, causing things to mire down. “So much of it couldn’t move,” Bartz said.
Asked to describe the scene after the Japanese began shooting, Bartz said, “Everybody seemed to be dying, pretty near.”
It took a half day for the Marines to get to the bottom of Mt. Suribachi, Bartz remembers.
The only good side to the soft sand, said Bartz, was that when the enemy mortar rounds hit, they didn’t fragment and fly out as much as they would had there been a hard surface.
The wounds
It was early afternoon on the first day of the invasion when Bartz was wounded.
He was at the base of Mt. Suribachi as Marines were trying to end the Japanese firing from the caves in that area. He was crouching in a location with no cover, carrying six mortar shells and part of a mortar cannon to set up for assembly.
He was also separated from the rest of his outfit at that point and he was trying to find members of his company. So many of the members had already gotten killed, he said.
Then a mortar landed nearby, sending fragments into Bartz’ left leg and hip. It felt like bee stings at first, he said. But then he felt his leg and realized he was bleeding. “Then it hurt,” he remembers.
Bartz was able to walk to a transport to be taken to a hospital ship. There, the first pieces of his shrapnel were removed.
Four years later back in Princeton, Dr. Alfred Kapsner, who had been an Army doctor, removed one more piece of shrapnel. That one was in Bartz’ left hip.
Bartz witnessed one of the iconic World War II Pacific battle scenes during the invasion of Iwo Jima. That was the raising of the American flag on top of Mt. Suribachi. Bartz said he saw from his vantage point on the hospital ship the flag raising on the fourth day of the invasion.
The hospital ship took Bartz to the island of Saipan with the purpose of leaving him in a hospital there. But the hospital was filled and so he was taken to Guam.
The patients already in the hospital in Guam were supposed to have been taken to the states, but they couldn’t because of dysentery. That meant no room for more wounded like Bartz.
An officer with an aircraft carrier who was heading to the states took Bartz and 11 other wounded military personnel with him.
Being on that aircraft carrier was like heaven, Bartz said.
He went home in March, 1945, and then returned to the hospital. Then he received 30 days furlough and returned home again.
He was next sent to Camp Pendleton for duty as a military police (MP) officer. But after four months of that, the brass decided to end the MP patrol, Bartz said. He served in a couple other driving roles before he left active military duty in May, 1946.
Bartz’ wounds remind him they are still there. When he sits for a time, the area that was wounded gets “itchy and stiff,” he says.
The purpose of the U.S. invasion of Iwo Jima was to take the island’s airfields. Of the 22,786 Japanese soldiers defending Iwo Jima, 21,703 died either through fighting or by ritual suicide. Only 1,083 were taken prisoner.
Thoughts on the invasion
“I kind of wondered why we took that island,” Bartz said. “We lost so much for so little.”
The United States had the atomic bomb and yet there was one more big invasion after Iwo Jima that of the island of Okinawa.
Not long after taking Okinawa, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, resulting in the Japanese surrender.
The United States hadn’t planned to lose as many as it did in the Iwo Jima and Okinawa battles, Bartz said.
Life at home
Bartz met Phyllis while he was home after being wounded. Ken and his late brother Roy Bartz married the two McBroom sisters — Phyllis and Florence.
Roy went into the military six months after Ken did and was in the Navy Seabees. Roy helped build an airfield in Hiroshima, Japan, after the Japanese surrender.
When Ken Bartz went to Camp Pendleton he and Phyllis exchanged letters and later began going together. The two wed June 25, 1949.
Bartz said he didn’t know at first that he had received the Purple Heart medal until after leaving the military. It had been sent home to his parents, William and Lillie Bartz.
“I thought it was a good deal,” he said about the medal, because then he knew he was going to get a “pension.”
When the United States later returned Iwo Jima to Japan, Bartz didn’t think it was right, he recalled. But then he embraced the act as he thought about how Japan had become allies with the U.S.
About a decade or so ago the Marines offered a special discounted trip for Fifth marines veterans to visit Iwo Jima. Bartz says he had no intention of going. “There were so many other places to see,” he reasoned, adding that there was really nothing much on Iwo Jima anymore.
And what are the strongest feelings that Ken Bartz has about his war experience?
“I wonder how our folks took it,” he said, “that two sons left [for military service during World War II] in less than a year?”
Ellie
By Joel Stottrup
If you look on page 43 of Ken Bartz’ copy of “The Spearhead, the World War II History of the 5th Marine Division” by Howard M. Conner, you will find a handwritten remark by Bartz.
The book states that prior to invading the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima in the South Pacific, the 50,000 Marines on board ships in front of Iwo Jima “gobbled a breakfast of steak and eggs.”
Bartz refuted that with a handwritten comment on the bottom of the page that says: “Not so, they got bologna sandwiches.”
Bartz, of Princeton, ought to know, as he was one of the Marines in the invasion.
Bartz was also wounded during the invasion and has the Purple Heart medal for it.
Bartz, 83, with his wife Phyllis seated next to him, recounted his experiences leading up to, during and after the Iwo Jima invasion.
The taking of Iwo Jima was one of the most bloody battles of World War II and came toward the end of the war as the allies in the Pacific were closing in on Japan.
The American losses are recorded at 6,821.
A sickly boy is chosen for the tough duty
Bartz grew up on a dairy farm in Bogus Brook Township six miles north of the city of Princeton.
Bartz was in his own words, “sickly” all through his high school years.
He explained that he had a type of hernia in which his heart was positioned in the wrong place, “sort of crushing his lungs and hampering his breathing.”
He was advised, because of his health, to get off the farm and find work that was “light.” Shortly after graduation from high school he had surgery that successfully repositioned some organs. Six months later, in March 1944, he was drafted.
This went against a doctor’s prediction that Bartz would never enter military service. Bartz said a doctor offered to write a letter to keep him out of the military, but Bartz decided against it.
Bartz was part of a group of 20 army draftees assembled at Ft. Snelling in St. Paul when an officer announced that 10 of the 20 were needed to join the Navy. The 10 were classified as the “better fit” people in the 20, and Bartz was chosen as one of the 10.
That was kind of ironic, Bartz indicated, being he hadn’t yet healed from his hernia operation.
Things got even tougher for him when he ended up one of three men selected from the original 10, as fit to be a Marine.
Bartz considered this a bit odd, since he weighed only 115 pounds at the time.
When he arrived for his basic training in San Diego, Calif., he had to go to the hospital for a month because he wasn’t done healing from his hernia surgery.
Meanwhile, he was hearing reports from other recruits of how tough the Marine Corps training was. He remembers thinking that he was ready to get out of the Marines right there and return home to the family farm.
But the Marines kept him and he decided that he was going to hold up his end during training, despite still being weak.
But he ran into a challenge he could not conquer right away, and that was to pass the Marines’ swimming test. After not passing it with the rest of his company he was placed on kitchen duty for a month until he could join another Marine company.
Once in his new company, he was given more swimming instruction. It was the kind of training where they “leave you to drown, almost, and then pick you up,” he said.
He finally passed the swimming test and left basic training for advanced instruction at Camp Pendleton, a short distance up the California coast. He was trained for six months to be part of a 60mm mortar cannon squad.
Then he was put aboard a ship in San Diego heading out across the Pacific Ocean. First stop was the big island of Hawaii. There he trained for four months. It was now the latter part of 1944 and the Japanese had fortified various home islands in the South Pacific. Bartz says that while in Hawaii he still didn’t know where the Marine Corps was sending him.
As his ship reached Iwo Jima, the officers informed the Marines where they would be invading. Iwo Jima stood as a barren rock of an island where the allies had been bombing incessantly in hopes of reducing the Japanese ability to defend.
Bartz remembers being told by superiors that, because of the allied bombing, the Marine 5th Division could just “walk on” to the island because “nobody was there.”
While the Japanese defenders held their fire for a short time as the Marines began landing, the Japanese once firing, resisted fiercely.
Bartz’s Fifth Division was assigned to take Mt. Suribachi, on the south end of Iwo Jima.
The record continues that allied air power took over at 8:05 a.m. to bomb and strafe the island.
After a period of that, ships blasted the island again for a time. The Marines began moving ashore in waves at about 8:30 a.m.
The men had been given “bologna and powdered eggs” that morning instead of the promised steak and eggs, and that “made us mad,” Bartz said.
“What are we doing here?” he remembers thinking as the Marines were going in to shore. He knew the island was only eight miles across at its longest and two miles at its shortest. How could all the fighting equipment such as the tanks and artillery that were amassed, fit on the crowded space, he recalled wondering.
He also wondered what the invasion would be like at night. But Bartz would not have to worry about that as things turned out.
Bartz said that as he moved onto the beach in one of the first waves of the invasion force, there was no shooting from the Japanese. That is, until eight waves of Marines had landed, he explained.
Japanese tanks and artillery pieces that were hidden in caves, or dug into the rocky terrain then opened up. Besides the many caves that hid the enemy, the caves were connected to a huge tunnel system.
Advancing was difficult for the Marines and their armored equipment because the beach was a soft lava sand, causing things to mire down. “So much of it couldn’t move,” Bartz said.
Asked to describe the scene after the Japanese began shooting, Bartz said, “Everybody seemed to be dying, pretty near.”
It took a half day for the Marines to get to the bottom of Mt. Suribachi, Bartz remembers.
The only good side to the soft sand, said Bartz, was that when the enemy mortar rounds hit, they didn’t fragment and fly out as much as they would had there been a hard surface.
The wounds
It was early afternoon on the first day of the invasion when Bartz was wounded.
He was at the base of Mt. Suribachi as Marines were trying to end the Japanese firing from the caves in that area. He was crouching in a location with no cover, carrying six mortar shells and part of a mortar cannon to set up for assembly.
He was also separated from the rest of his outfit at that point and he was trying to find members of his company. So many of the members had already gotten killed, he said.
Then a mortar landed nearby, sending fragments into Bartz’ left leg and hip. It felt like bee stings at first, he said. But then he felt his leg and realized he was bleeding. “Then it hurt,” he remembers.
Bartz was able to walk to a transport to be taken to a hospital ship. There, the first pieces of his shrapnel were removed.
Four years later back in Princeton, Dr. Alfred Kapsner, who had been an Army doctor, removed one more piece of shrapnel. That one was in Bartz’ left hip.
Bartz witnessed one of the iconic World War II Pacific battle scenes during the invasion of Iwo Jima. That was the raising of the American flag on top of Mt. Suribachi. Bartz said he saw from his vantage point on the hospital ship the flag raising on the fourth day of the invasion.
The hospital ship took Bartz to the island of Saipan with the purpose of leaving him in a hospital there. But the hospital was filled and so he was taken to Guam.
The patients already in the hospital in Guam were supposed to have been taken to the states, but they couldn’t because of dysentery. That meant no room for more wounded like Bartz.
An officer with an aircraft carrier who was heading to the states took Bartz and 11 other wounded military personnel with him.
Being on that aircraft carrier was like heaven, Bartz said.
He went home in March, 1945, and then returned to the hospital. Then he received 30 days furlough and returned home again.
He was next sent to Camp Pendleton for duty as a military police (MP) officer. But after four months of that, the brass decided to end the MP patrol, Bartz said. He served in a couple other driving roles before he left active military duty in May, 1946.
Bartz’ wounds remind him they are still there. When he sits for a time, the area that was wounded gets “itchy and stiff,” he says.
The purpose of the U.S. invasion of Iwo Jima was to take the island’s airfields. Of the 22,786 Japanese soldiers defending Iwo Jima, 21,703 died either through fighting or by ritual suicide. Only 1,083 were taken prisoner.
Thoughts on the invasion
“I kind of wondered why we took that island,” Bartz said. “We lost so much for so little.”
The United States had the atomic bomb and yet there was one more big invasion after Iwo Jima that of the island of Okinawa.
Not long after taking Okinawa, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, resulting in the Japanese surrender.
The United States hadn’t planned to lose as many as it did in the Iwo Jima and Okinawa battles, Bartz said.
Life at home
Bartz met Phyllis while he was home after being wounded. Ken and his late brother Roy Bartz married the two McBroom sisters — Phyllis and Florence.
Roy went into the military six months after Ken did and was in the Navy Seabees. Roy helped build an airfield in Hiroshima, Japan, after the Japanese surrender.
When Ken Bartz went to Camp Pendleton he and Phyllis exchanged letters and later began going together. The two wed June 25, 1949.
Bartz said he didn’t know at first that he had received the Purple Heart medal until after leaving the military. It had been sent home to his parents, William and Lillie Bartz.
“I thought it was a good deal,” he said about the medal, because then he knew he was going to get a “pension.”
When the United States later returned Iwo Jima to Japan, Bartz didn’t think it was right, he recalled. But then he embraced the act as he thought about how Japan had become allies with the U.S.
About a decade or so ago the Marines offered a special discounted trip for Fifth marines veterans to visit Iwo Jima. Bartz says he had no intention of going. “There were so many other places to see,” he reasoned, adding that there was really nothing much on Iwo Jima anymore.
And what are the strongest feelings that Ken Bartz has about his war experience?
“I wonder how our folks took it,” he said, “that two sons left [for military service during World War II] in less than a year?”
Ellie